Of all the adjectives used to describe him, Robert Vesco - who has died at 72 - was happiest with "financier". For the son of an Italian immigrant carworker in Detroit, the word had an exotic ring and he did not like to be called a crook, conman, fugitive, mobster, swindler or international drug dealer.

At his peak in the 1970s, he was worth several hundred million pounds (the equivalent of a few billion today), sailed the Caribbean in a Roman Abramovich-style yacht and flew around the world in a private Boeing 707 complete with discotheque, sauna and stewardesses who were particularly attentive to his needs. He named the aircraft the Silver Phyllis although it was not silver and he had no relatives called Phyllis. Apparently, the fact that it sounded like a venereal disease amused him.

Vesco was a self-made man who, as a young entrepreneur, liked to tell strangers he was chief executive of LPI. To the brave who dared ask, he would reply with a grin: Looting and Plundering Incorporated. He first came to world prominence when he took over Bernie Cornfeld's flagging, Geneva-based Investment Overseas Services in 1970. Billed at the time as a "white knight," he liked that phrase so much that he rode off into the sunset with, according to US authorities, most of the investors' money - $224m to be exact. That allowed him to buy the yacht and the plane, which "made Air Force One [the US president's aircraft] look like a no-frills airline", according to a friend. The rare photographs of him, craggy-faced, with dark wavy hair, sideburns and designer shades, gave him something of a rock star image.

When he got rumbled by the Feds, he allegedly paid $200,000 (handed over in cash) to a staffer of Maurice Stans, then US commerce secretary and chief fund-raiser for Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign, to persuade Nixon to halt the US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation against him over the IOS swindle. The alleged bribe did not, in fact, turn the heat off him but it did, according to US court records, help finance the famous Watergate burglary that would eventually bring Nixon down.

Vesco thought owning his own country might help him out of a tight spot, and he could create his own passport, pay no tax and exempt himself from extradition. With the help of an influential political family in Antigua, he tried to establish what he called the Principality of the Sovereign Order of New Aragon, covering part of Antigua's sister island of Barbuda, which he planned to turn into a "little Monaco in the Caribbean". After that plan fell through, his attempt to broker the sale of US military aircraft to Colonel Muammer Gaddafi in Libya also ran into problems.

Thereafter, Vesco settled in Cuba and confined himself to simpler pursuits - helping run cocaine to the US via Nicaragua and Cuba, according to a US court deposition - and announcing he had found a citronella-based "miracle drug" called Trioxidal, or TX, that could cure cancer, Aids, arthritis, herpes, you name it, and allow each of us to live for several hundred years by boosting our immune system.

As it turned out, he was jailed in Cuba for fraud before the drug saw the light of day. Fidel Castro, the president, saw through the scam, put Vesco on trial as "a conspirator and agent of foreign secret services", and had him locked away for 10 years.

True to his lifestyle, the world did not even know until last week that Vesco had died last November 23, or that the unmarked grave outside Havana, Cuba, was his. True to his lifestyle, there are some who wonder if he faked his own death to con the world one last time.

Robert Lee Vesco was born in Detroit on December 4 1935, the son of an Italian father and a Slovenian mother. He made a few bucks by opening bingo halls, bought a machine-parts company which he renamed, revealing the extent of his ambition, the International Controls Corporation, and was a dollar millionaire before he was 30. In 1970, he read about Cornfeld, a fellow American who had used Switzerland's tax loopholes to run International Investment Services, a hallof-mirrors corporation aimed at getting credulous people to invest in . . . well, as it turned out, Cornfeld himself. When Vesco came along as a "white knight", investors were relieved - of the rest of their money.

With the SEC on his tail, Vesco drifted between countries where he could not legally be touched by American authorities: Costa Rica, Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, the Bahamas and finally Cuba, where Mr Castro accepted him as "a persecuted deer" until he fell foul of the Cuban leader.

Vesco, by then with a Canadian passport in the name of Tom Adams, became noted for his wild parties on his 137-foot yacht, for which the Cubans dredged a special berth in the city's Hemingway Marina. He would pop up on Havana's only golf course, where locals noted that he always had four caddies, each with a gun-butt protruding from under his guayabera . He liked a few mojitos in what was called the 19th Hole Bar even though it was only a nine-hole course.

When cohorts of Carlos Lehder. the Medellin cocaine baron now jailed in the US, told American investigators Vesco had arranged free passage over Cuba for Mr Lehder's drugs aircraft to the US, Mr Castro was not pleased. But in the end it was the "miracle drug" scheme that put Vesco into a Cuban jail, from 1995 until 2005.

In 1995, I went to Havana to try to interview Vesco in jail. I failed, but found his partner in the pharmaceutical enterprise, Donald M. Nixon, widely known as Don Don, who happened to be a nephew of the former US president.

Proudly showing me a custom-made Havana cigar in the shape of a large penis, complete with testicles, Don Don told me: "Bob [Vesco] is the most brilliant man I've ever met". Speaking of the drug TX, which got Vesco jailed, Mr Nixon insisted it would have been "the biggest story ever, the biggest breakthrough in the history of man, changing the total social and economic structure of the world . . . worth $10m a month net".

Robert Lee Vesco is survived by his second wife, Lidia Alonso, and four children.